Wait. It gets worse. Library branches may cut hours, one may even close, and meanwhile the budget for books and other content is suffering. Hello, Warren Buffet? Aren't you the same Omaha guy who has sent many billions out of town for Bill Gates's foundation to hand out—with most of it leaving the U.S.?

Global altruism is praiseworthy, given all the need for economic development and better health in developing countries; but how about Omaha itself?

"The library already sees six-month wait times for materials" such as books that patrons request, says KETV. What's more, "interim director Norma Pontee said there are serious maintenance needs across the city. Some furniture and carpet" have not "been cleaned in 18 months."

And thinking more strategically, how about a national digital library endowment to help address the library needs of U.S. cities, especially those without billionaires in their midst? Your current worth, Mr. Buffett, is about $72 billion. I'm sure your family has given before to local libraries, but how about reassessing the current levels of philanthropy for Omaha?

While Omaha's mayor actually has proposed a higher library budget, this still won't be enough due to inflation and other causes. Yes, immediate local needs first, Mr. Buffett. Care to help all branches in the Omaha system keep full hours and enjoy better than a substandard budgets for books and other items? Either the old-fashioned way or electronically, you should buy or borrow or otherwise obtain a copy of Bleak House (also available through Project Gutenberg). Then read up on the character of Mrs. Jellyby, who, while horridly neglecting her own family, constantly fixates on the fate of Africans. Don't you pride yourself on your own hometown? I'll not dismiss you here as another Jellyby. Let's see what you and others in your family can do.

Looking beyond Omaha, we should help people in both the U.S. and developing countries in a meaningful way. If you doubt we're in trouble, just read Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. Among other things, it mentions the benefits of libraries and also reminds us of the digital divide—especially in regard to how well-off kids use the Net vs. the disadvantaged ones.

A national digital library endowment, expanding resources ranging from e-books to training in information literacy, would be one way to help avoid the Jellyby Syndrome.

The current national average on library content spending, by the way, is a pathetic $4 per capita or less than the price of a Big Mac here in the U.S, a figure well known to you via Berkshire-Hathaway's partial ownership of MacDonald's. Your company is in my retirement account. Long term, I trust you and your colleagues to invest wisely on behalf of shareholders. As a philanthropist, you should do the same for Omaha children and parents and the rest of America. A national digital library endowment could help turn things around and dovetail nicely with the Gates-Buffett Giving Pledge. None other than the late William F. Buckley Jr., our political opposite, wrote two "On the Right" columns on behalf of a national digital library and philanthropy to help fund it, in line with the basic TeleRead vision from the 1990s. Ideally Buffett and encourage policymakers and other philanthropists to catch up with WFB.

On top of everything else, Buffett should keep in mind that as a patron at least, he and public libraries go way back. "I started investing when I was 11," the Motley Fool site quotes him, "but I started reading about it when I was seven. So I'd gone through all—I'd read every book in the Omaha public library by the time I was 12 on investing and the stock market. I had a lot of fun, but I never really found out, I never really got grounded in anything. It was entertaining, but it wasn't going to be profitable." If nothing else, however, the Omaha Public Libraries fueled Buffett's fondness for investments. Besides, imagine how national digital library systems could help young investors not only with books but also with librarian-assisted access to authoritative databases. Such an approah could make informed investing more doable for the nonelite and maybe even for a future Buffett.

Simply put, in helping libraries both locally and nationally, Warren Buffett would be giving back to the people who helped him amass that $72 billion.

David Rothman { Thanks, Todd. A few points: 1. Portals rich in metadata---not just full-fledged archives---can be useful. Of course, I wish the DPLA interface were better so... } – May 06, 1:04 PM

Todd { I'm confused by your call to support the DPLA with an endowment. If the DPLA is to become a real public library it needs to... } – May 06, 12:33 PM

David Rothman { Thanks for caring about this important issue, Robert. iBooks' TTS isn't as slick as it could be, nor is the TTS as used on the... } – Jan 03, 9:20 PM

Robert Nagle { The fact that the low powered earlier Kindle 3 model could implement a reasonably functional version of text-to-speech suggests that the technological challenges of doing... } – Jan 03, 9:09 PM

David Rothman { Hi, Troy--I very much appreciated your note. No, not much is available in Alexandria in terms of general bookstores, perhaps partly because rents around here... } – Oct 21, 2:15 PM

Troy Johnson { I wish I read this aticle before compiling my list of best cities for readers of African American literature. Part of my motivation for publishing... } – Oct 21, 1:21 PM

David Rothman { Thanks for your comments, Jen. Actually we agree in many if not most ways. I certainly want librarians to be able to go outside to... } – Oct 15, 12:39 PM

Jen { Sadly, I don't share your optimism about the ability of libraries to manage the security of their own applications. Libraries have good intentions when it... } – Oct 15, 12:12 PM

Diane Romm { We did that once before. It was called a subscription library, and it's what existed before the rise of free public libraries. What did it... } – Jul 22, 9:51 AM

David Rothman { Thanks for your opinions, L.O. A lot of sensible people share our feelings about the greater value that a different approach could add. Here are a... } – Jul 05, 12:25 PM

Library Observer { I admittedly have no knowledge of the internal dollars and cents workings of Overdrive -- but it does touch on topics that I have always... } – Jul 05, 11:45 AM

David Rothman { Hi, Mike. I really appreciate your suggestions, but Testbag, almost surely one of the offenders, is not even on the app menu within Settings. And... } – May 16, 8:14 PM

Mike { Just go in settings, application and disable (if you cannot uninstall) the apps (like ubiinfo) that bugs you with ads. Avast antivirus for Android will tell you... } – May 16, 1:54 PM